Tag Archives: freedom

Gaining time, ages of it: That’s how she had begun to feel recently. It was no longer an anxiety driven chase of minutes, or breaking down her days into portions of obligations and thinking too far ahead; so far ahead that she would forget to observe the very happening of time — and herself in it: unfolding, expanding, altering, learning to love. The tension that came from her knowledge that she was lacking, losing time would settle at the medial edges of her eyebrows, making her forehead feel like a heavy awning. For years, she had worn the weight of time on her face; and while the losses surmounted, as they do in any life, she found herself at a deficit of time for mourning.

Larisa stepped out of the church. The city, still moving slowly after the snowstorm, was gradually waking. Older women carried netted bags with groceries from the bazar; the men smoked. The young raced, chased, took for granted stretches and stretches of time. The sun had been beaming down; and although it didn’t have the strength to thaw out the iced pavements yet, the smells of eventual spring could already be detected in the air. Everything was beginning to exhale. Larisa smiled:

But, of course, change would come! It always did! In her memory, there was no specific day when this awareness had happened in her, no event that — again, with time — revealed its lesson: that she wasn’t really living all this time, but merely waiting for her days to end, wasting them on worry, on an anticipation of her own expiration and on counting up her lacks. Growing tired, perpetually tired, she found herself lacking patience. How could her life force fade so early on? And she was terrified of it: to lose the joy of living would make a life’s uselessness more daunting. She didn’t want to live with that. And she was not going to lose the hope! No, not the hope; not the sometimes demonstrative belief of hers that people were prone to goodness; and that even though she could never expect it, kindness would make its presence known, and it would lighten up at least some events with grace. Oh, but she needed to — she had to! — believe that!

Watching the rush of morning trolleys clunk past her, Larisa decided to walk. The cold stiffness of the air entered her lungs, brought on an alertness. The kindness hadn’t slept a wink that night. And so, she continued to roam through her city, with books in hand: the city which she hadn’t made her home yet, just a place where she would watch her youth unfold; but at any moment, she could give it up, take off again, the gravity of responsibilities not affecting her yet; and she could chose any place (she could go any place, really!); and the mere awareness of such freedom made the heart swell with tearful gratitude.

In that state, while absorbing the city from the top stair of the library building, she had met him. It was the music, at first, streaming out of the rolled down window of his car. She stopped to listen to it: Chopin? Debussy? In the gentle strokes of the piano movement, the city glistened. She stepped down and resumed her walk.

“I was just thinking myself, ‘Am I ready to part with this Blok collection?’” He had gotten out of the car and was now leaning against the passenger’s window at the back seat. Larisa smiled: Blok — Russia’s golden boy of poetry — had made her girlfriends swoon all through college. She studied the man’s face for a glimmer of ridicule: Had he seen her leaving the building with half a dozen of hard-bound (cloth) tomes, half of which she had renewed, unready to part with the moods, the atmosphere they proposed? But if anything, the man was smiling at his own expense, bashfully and maybe even seeking her opinion on the matter. She considered it, then spoke carefully:

“You should try some early Akhmatova.”

“Too tragic,” he responded, “especially for the end of this winter.”

That’s it! Right there, she knew exactly what she meant! But for the first time, she did’t catch herself forced into a space of controlled flirtation from which she could observe — but not always appreciate — the effects of her presence. How can I hold all this space now, she thought; how can I stand here, not putting up the heightened facade of my sex?

She couldn’t remember if it had ever been this easy before. Aloneness would still happen, of course, even if this were indeed the evidence of her change. It wouldn’t stop, neither would she want it to. But now it united, linked her to the rest of humanity; and even in the isolation of the specificity of her most private experiences, she would understand so much; and in that surrender (if only she could manage to not lose herself in fear again), she was certain she would find kindness.

At the end of the summer, Marinka aimed to take entrance exams to the two top medical institutes in the city. Mother offered to pull some strings: The woman was never at a lack of connects. But I’ve gotta give it to sis! She was determined to get in on the basis of her merit alone. (In those days, the idealism of the Russian youth tended to have a longer expiration date. Skepticism stepped in much later, flooding anywhere where the Soviet control of information gave room.)

So, after half of June spent on cramming for her high school finals, Marinka hibernated for about week; then, immediately resumed her studies. Mother wasn’t thrilled about it:

“Now, instead just one bookworm, I have two Oblomovas in the house!”

Those days, I began to wonder about what constituted a woman’s happiness. Mother, whose only expression of joy was overly stretched, forced — a sort of a strained delirium — didn’t strike me as genuine, but something quite the opposite, nearing insanity. She wasn’t happy in the way that Olya Morozova seemed, in her mother’s altered dress, on her own wedding day. And any time I’d seen her since, blissfully pregnant or contemplatively picking tomatoes at a market on weekends, she looked like someone composing a complicated orchestral movement: Lost in thoughts that she desired, never seeking approval (and why would she need it, with her moderate beauty, always basking in adoration?); content but not out of love or out of curiosity; fluid, available; kind.

For the first few weeks, mother struggled with the no longer vague signs of her oldest daughter’s ambition. She sized up our bunk beds, branding us with the name of the biggest lazy ass in the whole of Russian literature: Oblomov. Other times, she tempted us with distractions: a rerun of Santa Barbara or the news of other women’s misfortunes. It would happen mostly in that late afternoon hour, when mother, having returned yet again from a day of hunting for discounts and gossip, was expected to be in the kitchen. And we were expected to assist, simply because we were daughters. And therefore born female. And therefore, we had no choice. (But one always had a choice, even in the country that didn’t advertise freedom. We could choose the other way: the way outside of the expected, of the presumed.)

In response to the call for confrontation, I listened to my sis remain motionless above my head. It gave me the courage to stay sprawled out on my stomach as well, despite the signs of mother’s fuming in the doorway. The smell of her perfume lurked more oppressively than her silence. The anxiety of always, somehow, being perpetually wrong — inappropriate, incorrect — stirred in my chest. What was to happen?

Mother exhaled audibly, turned on her heels and stormed out of our room, making a ruckus with the bamboo curtains in the doorway. I held my breath, just in case of her abrupt return; until a few moments later, the kitchen appliances began tuning into an orchestra of percussions. I suppose a light touch does not belong to every woman; and our mother exorcised her frustrations via the objects that reminded her of domesticity.

I slathered up the ladder to Marinka’s bed and rested my chin on the last plank:

Sis looked up: “Hey, monkey.” She stopped chewing on her pencil for long enough to smile faintly, as if to herself. There was that mystery, again; the place of thoughts where women departed — to create, to process, to understand; or maybe rather to mourn, or to escape.

“Oooh,” I bulged out my eyes in the best dramatic delivery I’d inherited from mom, hissing: “Mom’s pee-ssed!”

Marinka smirked — inhaled — and resumed making a meal out of her pencil again. The two females had been in a bickering war this entire summer. Still, sis would not speak unkindly of our mother, at least not to me. To be the last to abandon her graces was my sister’s route to growing up. Descending into silence, she never gossiped in return these days, only listened whenever mother couldn’t hold it in.

Sis was curled up in the corner or plastered against the wall. She looked dewy and flushed. Her eyes shined with the symptoms of the cooped-up syndrome. She appeared sleepy and slightly dazed. Colorful drawings of human insides, notebooks, flashcards, a pile of reference encyclopedias borrowed from the library, a tipi of stacked colored pencils were spread on top of the purple blanket we’d inherited from our grandmother in Siberia. The old woman had died having accumulated nothing.

I watched Marinka’s plump lips mouth off unpronounceable terms. Mean smart! Ignoring my adoration (which was always too nosy or too hyper anyway), she leaned forward to flip a page; and, as she sometimes did in obedience to the flood of her kindness, grazed the top of my head with her sharp nails.

In those moments, oh, how I missed her already!

Some afternoons, when the heat became so unbearable not even the open windows offered much relief, we agreed to leave the house for the river bank. Half the town would have had the same idea by then. Mother grumbled about how we had wasted half a day on our shenanigans; yet, from the way she readied herself — nosily, running in her bra between the closets and the bathroom I wondered if she relished arriving to a packed beach. Giant straw hats with floppy edges were matched to colorful cotton sarafans with wide skirts that blew up at all the wrong times. There was a weightiness to most of mother’s possessions.

I was ordered to carry our picnic basket. Marinka was loaded up with blankets, towels and old linen sheets. We treaded ahead, while mother joined and laughed with various families, also en route to the river.

As predicted, everyone and their mother was out catching a break from the afternoon sun. The tilted bank was dressed with a smog of accumulated heat. For days, it hadn’t let up. Sheets and towels were splattered on top of yellowing grass, and families in various states of undress moved around sluggishly. Seemingly every kid in town, with the exception of the Slow Vanya who was home-schooled all of his life, was now squealing and splashing in the water.

As soon as we reached the top of the hill, an abrasive smell of fresh cow dung greeted us when the barely palpable breeze blew in our direction:

“Oh. We’ve missed the collective bath!” Marinka said under her breath. She was becoming funnier, too.

En route to and from their feeding ground, the farm cows were led into the river daily, to cool down and to get a break from the murders of flies. They must’ve just left.

Without getting up, the mothers were already hollering their instructions to the frenetic children again:

“Be careful, Irotchka!”

“Sasha! Don’t manhandle your sister!”

“What did I tell you about swimming that far?! MASHA!”

There were some fathers who got into the water on occasion, but they immediately got flocked by their own and other people’s children with runny noses and, for whatever reason, fatherless, for that day.

Our stuff hadn’t hit the ground, yet I was already squirming out of my clothes and hauling ass toward the water. Marinka dropped her load and scurried off after me, still in her jeans skirt with rhinestones on her pockets.

“Marina! Please watch where she goes!” mother, already slathering herself with sunflower oil in a company of her girlfriends, barely took notice of the fact that my beautiful, olive-skinned sister shed a few shades and turned nearly pale with terror.

She stopped. “Mama? She’s fine!”

I too looked back. Seemingly every hairy male appeared to have propped himself up on his elbows to get a better look at my sister’s behind. Mother was already gone, having departed quickly from any parental awareness. Marinka was expected to step in.

I slowed down and waited for my sister to catch up.

“If you’re lonely, I don’t have to go in.” Devotedly, I looked up at my sis. She seemed so out of place here, somehow kinder than the rest!

“It’s fine, my monkey,” she reached for my hand and looked ahead, at the glistening water at the other edge of the river, and the field of sunflowers there; or possibly further beyond all that, maybe somewhere where her life was going to begin.

“I like it,” one said, “I think” (unusually sheepishly for her nature). “It’s got some,” she rotated her wrists up in the air, looking for the less poetic word, “‘good light’.” It took a talent to be so vague. Or it took years of mutual knowledge and histories of hurt.

The younger one averted her eyes quickly. She was getting better at busying herself in the kitchen. Throughout her childhood, she’d witnessed mother’s chaos when other people came over to visit their place. They had been lucky that way, due to her father’s reputable profession: Always finding better living quarters, so others came over quite a bit. Wanting to be the talk of the town, mother buzzed and chattered in the kitchen; and she would bang the drawers with aluminum dinnerware and slam the cupboards in an orchestra of her exhibitionist domesticity.

While mother whipped up meals and refilled drinks, her girlfriends wandered around nosily, every once in a while coming upon a tiny girl, with eyes so large they took up half of her face, playing her own game of house in the furthest corner of the bedroom. Alone.

“So cute!” the women hissed, turning on their heels unhappily for having to divert their poking.

Mother continued conducting the percussions in her kitchen:

“She’s so quiet, that child! She’s all — my husband!”

The women moved about the living-room; lurked by the family’s photographs; touched, shifted, sniffed, demanded to know the origin of things:

“You are one lucky bitch, I hope you know.”

“They meant it as a compliment,” after the women’s departure, mother would attempt to clarify things — the delicate things that her daughter could not understand yet (but perhaps with time, she would). The evil smirk of the local Algebra teacher branded itself into her memory: How could these women mean anything good? But mother didn’t want to hear it: “Stop asking stupid questions anyway! This is adults’ business.”

But now:

“So,” the older woman spoke from the bedroom doorway and eyed the open, empty space. “Are you going to ask Mike to ship you the bed?” (Pause.) “Or do you plan to house this draft in here forever?”

“What do you mean by that?” the young woman stopped, knife in her hand.

“I mean, haven’t you, guys, divided things up officially yet?”

The young woman looked back down at the gutted pickled fish under her fingers, on the cutting board. It was a task that every Russian woman performed from A to Z. From A to YA. From A — to I. Her mother would’ve drowned the detailed fish in a pool of sunflower oil; and it would stare out, with dehydrated eyeballs from underneath a layer of butchered onions meant to cover up a job so messily performed.

While peeling onions, mom would begin to cry demonstratively:

“Oy! I so pity the little bird!”

What did the bird have to do with the fish? The bird — to I. The I — to eye. Still, mother was a funny actress, so the child would spit with laughter. She couldn’t help it: She was still in love with her original prototype back then.

She now thought of that one time a thin fishbone lodged in her throat for a week; and how she gagged every night, while mother hooked her sharp nails into the back of her tongue. For months to follow, sometimes, loose scales would reveal themselves stuck on her clothes or skin; or swimming in buckets of water with floor-scrubbing rags. Mom was a disaster in the house.

In her own kitchen, however, the young woman never kept the head. She wished she had a cat to feed it to. A cat — to make-up for the missing child, to make the loneliness less oppressive. She stared at the oval crystal bowl, with even filets of pink meat, neatly arranged.

She herself was a better housekeeper, yet heading toward a divorce nonetheless. Most likely:

“Mike and I aren’t talking, mom. You know that.”

“Oh! Yes. I see,” the old woman eyed the empty bedroom yet again: Why so much space for someone with defeated ovaries then? “You, young people! You have no concept of marital endurance any more.”

She swore, he thought of the idea first. At least, that’s how she remembered it. In his defense (why was she so willing to defend him?): In his defense — she wasn’t “willing”. He was right.

“It’s just that… something isn’t working,” Mike told her over the phone, the week of one Thanksgiving which they’d agreed to spend apart. He “couldn’t do it anymore”. Her work. Her books. Why was he always taking second place after her life? Once she hung up, she cried, of course, but mostly out habit; and out of habit, she started losing weight and sleep. That’s what a wife in mourning was supposed to look like, she decided. She cropped her hair, and started wearing pants and laced up wingtip shoes. In their crammed-in basement apartment in the Bronx, she found room to pace and wonder, “Why? Why? Why?”

Her girlfriends were eventually allowed to visit the site of her disastrous marriage. They bitched; they called him names. They lurked, touched, shifted, sniffed. They studied family photographs, still on display, for signs of early check-outs. The women patted her boyish haircut and teared up a bit too willingly, some of them — being slightly grateful for feeling better about their own men.

And then, one balmy New York August afternoon, she called him from a pay phone in Harlem.

“Meet me for dinner.”

An hour later, he showed up with lilies. After a dry peck that tasted unfamiliarly, she lead the way to a Dominican joint whose wall-full of French doors was always taken down for the summer. It breathed the smell of oil — and of fried everything — onto the sweaty pedestrians on Broadway.

On their side of the missing wall, the night dragged on with a strained politeness. His eyes were glossy, wet. She stared out onto the street. From either the heat of New York’s August and the lack of ventilation, the giant buds sweated under the plastic wrap; and by the time they finished picking through a pile of fried plantains, the lilies open completely, and just like everything at that time of the year — from sweat glands to subway sewers to perfume shops — they began to smell aggressively, nearly nauseating.

“I’m going to California,” she announced after finishing her white fish.

“Why?”

She looked down: After their six-month separation, she had begun to wear dresses and curl her hair again. She’d gained a certain swagger in the hips from wearing flat shoes through every season in New York. The flesh of femininity was finally beginning to lose the aftertastes of her youth’s self-loathing.

Not having gotten an answer, “When?” — he examined her with wet eyes of a lab.

She looked down again. The suppleness of her brown chest surprised her. She looked up: “Soon.”

Vagueness as a revenge: She’d learned that from her mother, the best that ever was! She owed him nothing. He was the one who’d given up! He was the one who left! But now, it settled at the bottom of her stomach, along with the plantains, like something begging for its freedom. And she, in her defense, was no longer “willing”.

It’s long past midnight in Warsaw. There is a new couple that has moved into the apartment across the street.

For the last two days, it has been sitting empty, with the curtains open and the stark white mattress in the middle of the living-room. On the first of the new year (today), they have appeared: He’s tall, with pepper and salt hair; she’s lovely. And even though I cannot see the details of her face underneath her bangs, I can imagine the high cheekbones and the doll-like roundness that I’ve been seeing in the store window reflections of the last twenty years.

I watch them from my kitchen, while drinking coffee. I am jet-lagged.

The curtains remain open and the yellow light of a single lamp is getting some assistance from the screen of their TV. They’re eating dinner that consists of corn on the cob and one bucket of KFC (so very Eastern European, as I have come to learn). Occasionally, they half turn their faces to each other:

“You want some tea?”

Or,

“For what time, you think, we should set the alarm clock, in the morning?”

I leave them be and wander from one room to another to check on our drying laundry. The guidebook never promised us domestic amenities, so the discovery of a washing machine in our kitchen came as a complete surprise. The dryer button is jammed on it though, but considering I have arrived here with my arrested expectations from post-Soviet Russia, circa 1997, I am extremely grateful for the dignified living standards with which this city has accommodated us.

Besides, the absence of a dryer — I find romantic. I run my hands along the cloths from my and my lover’s body, earlier drenched from running through this cold city, and wonder what it would’ve been like if I were to enter my womanhood in my birth place. Would I have known the grace of unconditional love and the finally non-tumultuous forcefulness of me? Would I’ve grown up kind, or would the much harder life of my homeland have taken a toll on my character and aged me, prematurely? And would I have the privilege of choices that make up my identity now, still generous and grateful for the opportunities I’ve found abroad?

Identity. In my impression of the world, this word comes from the American ventricle of me. But after this week’s reunion with my father, who never had the privilege to watch me make the choices that led me to the woman that I am, I am surprised to find myself resemble him so much. Despite the separation of nearly two decades: I am my father’s daughter. Of course, by some self-written rules, it’s presupposed that I have traveled further in my life than father ever did in his. I’ve been exposed to more world, and in return, it taught me to question twice all prejudices and violations of freedom. But what a joy it’s been to find that, in my father’s eyes, life is only about truth and grace and justice; and matters of identity, for him, have no affect on any person’s freedoms.

I wander back into the kitchen, sit down into my father’s chair. Thus far, it’s been the greatest pleasure of my life to watch him eat good food that I have made. While eating, dad is curious and — here’s that word again — grateful:

“What’s that ingredient?”

And,

“What do you call this bread?”

And I can see him now: slouching just a little above his meal, in this chair; shaking his head at the meal that he finds to be gourmet, while to us — it is our daily bread. I have to look away when with childlike amusement he walks his lips along a string of melted cheese:

Here is to more such meals, my most dear love, and to the moments that define a life! that must define MY life!

The couple in the window across the street has finished their meal. The table is still cluttered with settings, crumbled paper napkins and a red bucket whose iconography — although recognizable — is somehow different from the red-and-white signs that pollute the American skyline. The couple is now on the couch: She’s sitting up and removing pillows from behind her back, then tossing them onto the wooden floor. He is fetching two smaller ones, in white pillow cases, from the bed. Together, they recline again and progressively tangle up into each other, like lovers who have passed the times of dire passion and landed in that even-tempered place of loving partnership.

The light of the TV is now the only one illuminating their spartan room. From where I stand, now drinking a cup of black tea (still, jet lagged), I only see the back of his head and her hand that has ended up near his right shoulder. Occasionally, he half turns his face toward her, then turns toward the flickering blue light again:

“Are you comfortable, my love?”

Or,

“Would you rather watch the news?”

I walk into my bedroom to fetch my computer. The yellow light follows me from the kitchen and slowly dissipates as I approach the next doorway. It, ever so lightly, hits the exposed leg of my sleeping lover. I think I study him, but instead the mind gives room to memories of similar moments and visions. And in that suspended history of us, I reach into the drawer.

She’s wearing a pair of purple tights and a shirt with stripes of lemon and lime. Her tiny ankle socks match the overall yellowish-green of the shirt, and her feet are trying to wrap around the baby-size chair that used to belong to her younger self (not much younger though, considering she is not even in her teens yet.)

I notice the purple outline around the collar of the shirt:

“Those are some courageous color combos, my tiny one!” I nearly say out loud, but then I stop myself: Getting off on embarrassing a child would make me a major shithead!

And it’s not even mytype of purple either — but it is hers — as we’d figured out over the years. But, actually, her favorite color is green, so she often secretly dedicates her purple choices — to me. Her green is democratic: She likes most shades of it. Although, come to think of it, I’ve never really asked. When ever had I become one of those silly grown-ups — to dare taking these details for granted!

Her most heartbreaking features are her mother’s freckles and her father’s strawberry chin. From the way the sunlight hits her face, I notice the freckles — they now take up her whole cheeks, from the bridge of the nose and up to the temples; and I suppress a desire to hug her: She’s all grown up now — and way too mature for my mushy nonsense. So, I sort of let her dictate the boundaries, on her terms; and keep my grown-up business to myself.

For the last hour, she’s been playing with her father’s iPhone, pulling up songs we both might like. Some tunes are original. Others — are a remake by Glee: all the rave among the kids these days. (And if it weren’t for her, I would have never known it: I AM a grown-up, after all!)

Here comes the widely popular tune of this year: “There’s a fire starting in my heart…”

“Do you like Adele?” she has once asked me before, while hanging out in my bedroom. It made for a long discussion, that night, and we each took turns browsing YouTube for our favorite tunes and dancing. Yes, actually dancing: She, non-vainly, and I — unleashed by her innocence.

“Do you like Adele?” she echos now, looking up at me past her long bangs.

I like the way she wears her hair: It’s always shiny and sleek, never the tumbleweed seen in the photographs of me when I was her age.

We have both grown up as tomboys: I, perpetually clad in sweats as soon as I could get out of my itchy uniform, was always trying to outrun the boys and to lead the armies of first-graders in search of treasures on our town’s rooftops. She — kicks ass at soccer, climbs trees, plays handball; rides bicycles and rollerblades, masterfully and much better than me; and she always looks out for those who are tinier and more helpless. She is kind. She is always kind. For me, kindness, by now, takes discipline. To her — it’s still second nature. Or the first.

We’ve grown up under much different restrictions: I was bound to endless rules by my motha, the pedagogue, and the regulations of bureaucrats that dictated our lives. She, however, is ruled by common sense. Like her American-born parents, she is in tune with the concept of freedom and is already more aware of her rights and liberties at the age of ten. Unlike me, she also knows that choices come with a consequence.

Like this one — of her procrastinating on her homework for the sake keeping me company.

“Love that song!” I mumble. But she is already sneaking a peak over her shoulder and suppressing a gleeful smile. She knows.

Alright! Enough of the nonsense: It’s time for the homework! Or, so the adults tell her.

“Last one! Last one, I promise!” she says, but doesn’t plead. She is SO much cooler than me! Cooler than I’ve ever been!

It’s Glee, again: “I’m walking on sunshine, wooah!”

In a matter of seconds, she bounces, puts the iPhone away, whips out her backpack and plops down in a chair across the table from me. When she thinks, she looks away (sometimes chewing on a pencil): My own childhood habit. Which dreams is she sizing up, right now? What brave escapes is she plotting?

Bright and self-sufficient, she completes the work effortlessly, in a matter of minutes. No problem. She never gives the grown-ups a problem. Neither did I. It’s easier that way: keeps you clear of their nonsense.

But she does say though:

“I wish eight went into 60 evenly.”

I suppress a chuckle — and another hug. I still wish for such things all the time, my tiny one! And that — still! — must be just a matter of my innocence; or what’s left of it.

“Make a wish,” he said. “If you wish for something good — it WILL come true.”

I held the ring he gave me in the middle of my palm, and I stared at the open space caught in the center of its beaded circle. It was made out of a tightly wound spiral of a single metallic line, as thin as a single hair on a horse’s mane. I thought of my grandmother’s cuckoo clock whose pendulum she had stopped winding-up, suddenly one night.

Her husband, a retired fisherman, had gained himself a habit in his old age: He’d climb up to the roof above their attic to watch the sunset every night. There, he would witness the reunion of two unlikely lovers: The sun would give up the ambition of its skies and melt into the waters of the Ocean beneath; and every such reunion would illuminate the old man’s eyes with colors of every precious stone in the world.

There, up on the rooftop, my grandmother would find him, when she returned home from work.

“My little darling boy!” she’d gosh. “You’re too old for this game.”

She was eleven years his junior; but after a lifetime of waiting for the Ocean to return her lover, she hadn’t managed to forget her worries. And even with his now aged body radiating heat in their mutual bed each night, she would dream up the nightmares of his untimely deaths.

“I’ve died so many times in your sleep, my baby lark,” he joked in the mornings, “I should be invincible by now.”

Still, the woman’s worrisome wrath turned her into a wild creature he preferred to never witness: They were unlikely lovers, after all. So, he’d smirk upon her scolding, obey and lithely descend. Then, he would chase my grandmother into the corner bedroom of their modest hut. And she would laugh. Oh, how she would laugh!

One day, after she scolded him again, he slipped; and as she watched each grasp betray him, she suddenly expected that her lover could unfold his hidden wings and slowly swing downward, in a pattern of her cuckoo clock’s pendulum, or a child’s swing. But he was an injured bird: That’s why he could no longer go out to sea.

Upon the permanently wet ground, he crashed. And on that night, she stopped winding-up the spiral inner workings of her clock.

“Well? Did you make a wish?” the old Indian merchant asked me after I slipped his gift onto the ring finger of my left hand.

The beads rolled on the axis of the spiral and slid onto my finger like a perfect fit. On its front, four silver colored beads made up a pattern of a four-petalled flower, or possibly a cross. I bent the fingers of my hand to feel its form against my skin. Under the light, the beads immediately shimmered.

“Well? Did you?” the old, tiny man persisted.

Instead of answering him, I pressed the now ringed hand against my heart and nodded.

“See. It is already coming true,” he said.

He was by now sitting in a lotus position on top of a lavender cloud. It had earlier slipped out from behind the room with bamboo curtains, in the doorway, and it snuggled against his leg like a canine creature. Before I knew it, the old man got a hold of the scruff of the cloud’s neck, and he reached down below — to help me up.

His hand was missing a ring finger. How had I not noticed that before? I studied his face for remnants of that story. But it was not its time yet, so I got lost in between the wrinkles of his brown skin and followed them up to his eyes:

His eyes were two small suns, with amber colored rays. The center of each iris was just a tiny purple dot, too narrow to fit in my reflection. I looked for it though until the suns began to spin — each ray being a spoke on a wheel — faster and faster.

The spirals of the old man’s watch began unwinding, and we floated up through the layered clouds of time, up to the sunroof. With a single gesture of his arm, the man unlatched the windowed frames. He sat back down, shifted until his sit bones found their former markings in the lavender cloud; and when he turned to face me, I realized he had become a young lover of my own: with jet black hair and a pair of smirking lips of that old fisherman who had stopped the spiral of the clock inside my grandma’s hut.

“I had a feeling about you,” he said and buried his four-fingered hand inside my loosened hair. “You are the type to always wish — for good.”

It seemed like she was waiting for someone. By the bench, at the top of a hilly lawn, the bottom of which met with the narrow gravelly passage occupied by the late morning joggers, she stood there, barely noticed by others. An iron railing stretched on the other side of the path, and the bright blue waters of Monterey Bay seemed calm. A forest of boat masts kept swaying in their metronome rhythm. They clanked against each other with the hollow sound of empty water buckets or rusty church bells. The shallow waters by the shore were navigated by a couple of paddle boarders and glossy baby seals.

Was it her beloved heading home? Or was this just a mid-stop where she’d regroup for the next glorious flight of her freedom loving soul? She stood like she belonged to no one — but the call of her nature, immune to the voices of fear or doubt.

The Northbound wind frolicked with her straight white hair. I didn’t expect to see that texture on her body, but when I saw the handful of silky strands fly up on the side of her head, I stopped. She remained motionless: still and proud, slowly scanning the horizon with her focused eyes.

Just a few meters down, I myself had rested by a statue of a woman. I couldn’t tell how long ago I had left my room without having a preplanned route through this small town by the Bay; for I myself had come here to rest in the unlikely lack of my own expectations — my fears, worries and doubts — and I had let the movements of the sun determine my activities that day. So in its highest zenith, I departed from the four walls of my inn after the laughter of children — hyper way too early and fearlessly attacking the nearby pool — woke me up.

I began to run slowly at first, crossing through the traffic of drivers used to the unpredictable characters of pedestrians. Not once did I resort to my city habits of negotiation by scowls or passive-aggressive gestures. I bypassed the elders slowly walking, in groups, along the streets of boutique stores with hand-written signs for Christmas sales. The smell of caffeine and caramel popcorn would trail behind young couples on their romantic getaways. The joggers of the town were few and far between; so when I reached the narrow passage of the tree alley along the shoreline, I picked up my pace.

The wind kept playing with my fly-aways and untangling my tight hair bun. A couple of times I turned my head in the direction of its flow and saw the mirage outlines of my most favorite Northern City.

“By the time I get there, I shall be free of fear,” I always think but then return to the predetermined pacing of my dreams.

I noticed the statue’s back at first: A colonial dress peaked out from underneath a cape, and both were captured in the midst of their obedience to the same Northbound wind.

“A statue of a woman. That’s a rarity.”

And I walked up to her.

It seemed like she was waiting for someone. Up from the pedestal, she focused her gaze on the horizon. Her face was calm but gripped by prayer. I knew that face: It belonged to a lover who trusted that the wind would bring him back to her, unscathed. And even if he were injured on his odyssey or tempted by another woman’s feasts, she trusted he would learn and be all the better for it, in the end. Against her shoulder, she was leaning a wooden cross made of tree branches.

Santa Rosalia: The Italian saint of fishermen. She froze, in stone, in a perpetual state of beholding for other women’s men. Throughout centuries, so many freedom-loving souls must have departed under her watch, and I could only hope that most of them returned. But when the sea would claim them, did other women come here to confront her or to collect the final tales of their men dying fear-free?

I walked while thinking of her face. And then, I saw the other awaiting creature.

When she began to walk downhill, she’d test the ground with each step. With a balletic grace she’d stop at times, and study the horizon. The wind began to tease her silky hair. It took figure eight routes in between her legs, and taunted her to fly.

And so she did: On a single rougher swoosh of the wind, she stretched her giant stork-white wings, gained height and began to soar, Northbound and fear-free.

“It should not be denied… that being footloose has always exhilarated us. It is associated in our minds with escape from history and oppression and law and irksome obligations, with absolute freedom, and the road has always led West.”

Wallace Stegner, The American West as Living Space

“What if I walked away, right now, into these open spaces ahead?”

I wasn’t sure if every 19-year-old entertained such thoughts, but as I continued walking in the midday heat of a Southern California summer, I could see the journey clearly. I could see myself: A tiny figure whose outline was distorted by the heat rising from underneath the thin-soled Converse shoes, walking slowly but with certainty, fearless in the way of someone who had nothing to lose.

I had lost enough that year to not fear the possible pain of the unknown. I had lost enough to have nothing holding me in place. My college applications had been sent off late and only to a handful of unknown institutions with rolling admissions. Considering it was the end of August, I had assumed I had failed to get in.

Two marriage proposals had happened that summer, by two different men, neither of whom even pretended to understand me much. A month before, I had lost all of my cash, my car and my place of stay; and the absurdity of my pre-college summer was finished off — with a death.

As a matter of fact, it was the dead that was still keeping me in place.

She had died untimely, from a heart attack-ed. I was called out of my Anatomy Lab to receive the message. It was just a note, written on a pink slip that rarely meant good news. The couple of times that I had witnessed it being delivered into my classmates’ hands, they wouldn’t return for the rest of the day. Sometimes, they would be gone for weeks; and when they came back, I noticed the difference in their faces. It looked either like gravity — or weightlessness. I was about to find out which.

My messenger — an unknowing work-study student from the counselors’ office — ran out on me before I could ask him for any details.

“I have a note,” I told the receptionist in the counselors’ office, while rummaging in my schoolbag for my glasses.

“I know. They are still on hold,” she answered.

The supervisor of the office loomed in the background, by the copy machine. I saw his face, however blurry, and knew if I could see him any clearer, he would tell me of his sympathy. My hands continued shaking, as they searched the bottom of my bag for an item I insisted on needing before picking up the phone.

The next few days had passed in a slow-mo waltz of minutes. There would be phone calls and somber cards; a weeping husband on a flowery couch; a line of uninvited guests who would never be around whenever I was attacked by a slew of forms and interviews from funeral parlors.

“Whatever you need,” they promised to the weeping husband, as they too began to weep.

Nothing had prepared me for the questions that happened that week, from the people on the other end of the phone:

She was a donor, they said; and could they have my signature — to take her eyes?

Make a list of all the things, they told me: things to be placed inside her coffin. Did I know which she had treasured the most?

Choose the clothes she would be most comfortable in, they insisted: Shouldn’t she be comfortable, wherever she was going?

And was I sure she wouldn’t prefer cremation instead? (‘Cause that wouldn’t cost us as much, they would mention under their breath: After all, they weren’t completely heartless.)

The weeping husband continued to assume I was strong enough to take his place. No one had asked me if I was ready or willing, or knowledgeable of her last wishes. Perhaps, I had promised more competence than the bulb-nosed man on the flowery couch, who nodded and moaned, accepted troughs of food from the still uninvited neighbors, with their solemn faces and anecdotes about the dead.

“Whatever you need,” they mumbled over his shoulder as they hugged and strained their own faces for emotions.

On the morning of the funeral, I remembered shivering. They had wanted us to start early: The first burial of the day. And the morning would be so cold, and dewy. The husband continued to weep in the front row of gray plastic chairs, while I accepted envelopes and hugs from people I hadn’t known.

Thank you for coming.

Thank you for coming.

Thank you. It means so much.

The following week, I had promised to come back and clean out her closet. The task of deciphering the bus schedules and routes seemed absurd and painfully sad. I would study the indifferent faces of the drivers as they spoke gibberish about my transfers, and vouchers, and student passes.

I would get off on the last stop and study the desolate grounds and the open spaces ahead.

“What if I walked away, right now,” I thought, “into the open spaces?”

What if I followed the trajectory of black telephone lines or began chasing tumbleweeds:

Where would I end up? And would I end up free?

And would that freedom feel weightless, eventually returning my joy; my forgiveness?

“Where are you going?” P asked me on the phone during my monthly calls to Motha Russia, after I announced that I was busy packing.

“Eh. A little bit here and there,” I answered while measuring the contents of my closet against the mouth of my giant suitcase, gaping open on the floor. “Here and there. You know.”

I haven’t really finalized my travel plans yet. I mean: I knew I was heading back to Motha Russia — eventually. That explained the uproar currently happening in the family: They haven’t seen me in sixteen years, so the homecoming trip promised to be loaded.

But I wasn’t making that daunting trip for another couple of months. In the mean time, I was giving up my apartment and packing up my giant suitcase.

Apparently there was nothing out of the norm about the vagueness of my plans, because P was agreeing with me, quite enthusiastically:

“Da, da, da!” he said. “I’m listening.”

Dad had always been on my side. He had to be; because I never left him much of a choice but to get used to the nomadic habits of mine. I mean: All I ask for — is my freedom. Is that so hard?

But apparently, in order to accept my antsy temperament and the life-long addiction to wanderlust, I also ask for a lot of trust. Trust was exactly what I relied on when I announced my initial decision — sixteen years ago — to leave Motha Russia in pursuit of my education abroad. Trust was demanded when I later moved to New York, for the same reason; or when I committed the daunting trip back to Cali after my share of victories and defeats on the East Coast.

All along, my relocations were telegraphed to my folk back in Motha Russia on a monthly basis. Considering the homeland chaos, I took it upon myself to keep the connection alive; and I would call, from wherever I landed.

“I’m here, for a little bit. Here and there. You know,” I’d say, while unpacking another giant suitcase.

As far as I was concerned, I was fulfilling my daughterly obligations beautifully. So, whenever P would voice as much as a hesitation or a worry, I’d go bonkers:

“I mean… All I’m asking for — is my freedom! Is that so hard?”

P wouldn’t have much of a choice. So, he would agree with me, quite enthusiastically:

No one knows the responsibility of freedom better — than those of us who vow our lives to its pursuit.

I mean: All I am asking for — is my freedom. And all I am asking of my loves — is trust.

My addiction to wanderlust began in the first years of my life. Mere months after my birth, P — who devoted his life to building the Soviet Empire as an Army man — was being relocated from the East Coast of Motha Russia into the less populated inlands. The first couple of our moves would be done by train; and in the beginning of his career, P could track his ascent through the ranks by the route of the Trans-Siberian Railway.

“You’d always sleep easily, on trains,” he’d say any time I told him about the utter calmness I feel these days, when on a railroad.

His bigger promotion would take us into the middle of the country — into much more brutal winters and lands. For first time in my life, we would have to take a plane ride.

I wouldn’t be older than a year when motha packed me into a tiny suitcase that she kept unzipped on her lap during the 4-hour flight. She would have to get inventive and make a transient crib out of it, stuffing it with a pillow. I would be bundled up into a blanket and wrapped with a ribbon: A tradition taught to Russian mothers by the brutal winters of my Motha’land.

For the duration of the flight, I wouldn’t fuss at all.

“All I could see from my seat — was your button nose peaking out of the tiny suitcase: You were sleeping,” P would tell me whenever I confessed about the utter peace I always feel these days, when up in the air.

In order to feed my life-long addiction to wanderlust, I’ve had to grow up quite quickly. Motha Russia wouldn’t leave my generation much of a choice after the collapse of the Soviet Empire that our parents devoted their lives to building. So, instead of living in ruins, many of us chose to pursue a life — and an education — elsewhere. So, we packed our tiny suitcases and we left. We had to give up our childhood — and to grow up.

Because all we asked for — was our freedom. And for my generation, it was indeed very, very hard.

Because all I’ve asked for — is my freedom. And as someone who’s vowed her life to the pursuit of it, I’ve paid all the consequences of my choices in full — and they have indeed been very, very hard.

And after sixteen years of my untimely adulthood, he agrees with my pursuit of that calmness and peace that I always feel when transient; when in pursuit of my self-education — when in pursuit of my freedom.

“You jump to conclusions too fast,” my father would have said had I told him this story. “Too trusting — that’s your problem.”

Dad is fearful, especially as a parent; and I can’t really judge the guy for that. History has played a hideous prank on his country and his life, and it continues treating him and his people as dispensable. Surely, there cannot be a bigger heartbreak than that. There cannot be a bigger absurdity. And I can’t really blame the poor guy caught in the midst of a Kafka play.

So, I forgive him for his limitations, his shortcomings, his imposing fearfulness. Instead, I stretch the boundaries of my unconditional love — of my compassion — and I choose to think of him as a good man.

My father — is a good, good man.

But I would never tell him this story:

I was studying the face of a good man the other night. I barely knew him, but not once had I wondered whether he had made his share of mistakes in life, his share of missteps. I suppose I was certain he had. But they mattered little in that moment.

Because I chose to think of him as a good, good man.

(I AM too trusting — that’s my problem.)

And I listened.

He spoke to me of his travels, of leaving his doubts, vanity and fears behind; and biking across the country with nothing but a backpack and a camera.

He told me about the perseverance of the body if only one could control the mind. In survival, he said, there was a chronic juxtaposition of reflexes versus fragility. And when confronting the most basic needs, there was a balance and a great humility.

And there was beauty in the defeat of despair with one’s courage, in the elation of that success; and in the overall simplicity of living.

“What a good man!” I thought. “What a good, good man!”

The road threw him for a loop a number of times, but he told me about the clarity of the mind if one was traveling light.

“It’s a good thing I hit the road without any expectations,” he told me.

It made sense.

He spoke about having no possessions to weight down his choices and no expectations. Neither were there any grudges or resentments against humanity — others’ or his own. His journey was not a conquest: Not a thing dictated by the ego.So, he traveled with a lesser emotional baggage, as someone who knew the power of forgiveness all too well.

His only responsibility on the road — was his family. He would have been a lot more reckless, it seemed, had it not been for the nightly on-line messages that he promised to send their way. And so he would. No matter the difficulties of the day, no matter the survivals and the defeats, the despair and the courage, he would telegraph his experiences home. And these letters — his road journals, the confessions of a transcendent mind — were the only threads leading back to the people he loved.

The humble badass smiled at me as if he could read the answer on my face — my good, good face — and he said:

“Because the one thing I know — is that I cannot stop knowing.”

And so, I was studying the face of a good man the other night; and it made me think of life as a sequence of choices.

My life — was not the life of my father: I had bigger control over my circumstances; enough control to allow myself the occasional hubris of assuming that I was a person of consequence. I could make choices, you see. Unlike my father — my good, good father — I could choose my situations, or even change them. And I had the luxury of freedom: to pursue my life’s ambitions and to continue “knowing”; to continue learning.

Somehow, I had made the choice — to be good, in life. There had been plenty of situations that tested my ethics before. Yet even in defeat, in shame, in pain, I could always return to the track of goodness. I could always see my way back to redemption. Because even though my life was not my father’s, my ethics — were indeed his.

And my father — was always a good, good man.

And so, I was studying the face of a good, good man the other night; and it made me think of life as a sequence of choices.

“But I just can’t forgive myself,” my father had confessed a number of times. “That’s my problem.”

Alas: That was the main difference between my father’s character and my own. I always chose to travel lightly, as someone who knew the power of forgiveness all too well. I chose to have the power of self-forgiveness. And I could always see my way back to redemption.